Tag Archives: reality

Communism, one of the most virulent ideologies in the history of mankind, has proven harder to defeat than imagined just one generation ago. Though it doesn’t typically parade itself around in red uniforms anymore, communism is still very much alive, even if it is cloaked in the green jacket of radical environmentalism. And communism’s fundamental tenets of equality, class warfare, and wealth redistribution are core principles of the American left.

Most Americans no longer think communism is a threat or that discussing it is even relevant to modern political discourse. Though many understand that socialism is still around, they don’t consider it to be as dangerous as communism, or akin to it in any fundamental way. Communism no longer exists in the public mind, because the Soviet Union is no longer formally embodied, and the Chinese have introduced some market elements into their state capitalist economy.

But communism is just socialism run by the wrong people, so many leftists think. If one resorts to history to prove to a leftist that communism was a scourge on mankind that was a necessary result of socialist doctrine being put in practice, he will deny that history is relevant, or will claim that communism was never actually implemented.

The best way to describe this mindset is utopian. “Utopia” is a word from Greek meaning “no place.” It was first used in modern parlance in Sir Thomas More’s work “Utopia” to describe through the words of a world traveler in a classless society.

And communism is truly no place.

The broader point is that it is impossible for the right to use counterfactuals to disprove that communism works, because communism, the way the left idealizes it, doesn’t exist, and never existed. They see all the flaws of the world, they see capitalism, they see war, they see greed, and they see crime, and as long as those exist in any way, we don’t have communism. We have a capitalist society, one that must be razed to the ground so that a brave new world can be molded from the ashes.

Thus whatever the world is, as long as it is imperfect, it’s not communism. And as long as the world exists, communism cannot be argued against.

Americans can be divided into two main factions, conservatives and progressives, who are vying for the soul of the republic. On each side of the highly contentious issues facing this country, these factions have opposing views of what is “reasonable.” Grasping this fundamental issue of philosophy is crucial to preventing the dissipation and destruction of our Constitutional republic.

On the issue of reason, many conservatives look to the founding, which was based on an Enlightenment view rooted in Aristotelian philosophy. Leftists are irrational in the sense they do not believe in the Aristotelian view of reason, but rather argue that reason is determined by “discourse.”

The leftist program itself is specifically destructive of reason through its denial of objective reality and its embrace of Hegelian and Marxist dialectical philosophy. It is thus no exaggeration to call much of modern leftism solipsistic.

But there is another faction to consider: the “moderates” who view themselves as “reasonable” in the sense that they wish to avoid extremes. Many self-described “independents” seek to extricate themselves from the political conflict by not taking sides, while others simply feel that the “reasonable” view is not represented at all.

Reason, in the Enlightenment sense, can be seen as a faculty of the human mind that one uses to determine truth based on logic, evidence, and history. This view of reason can roughly be termed the “Aristotelian view” of reason, due to the great thinker’s codification of logic, his argument that objective reality exists independently of the mind, and the law of identity, which effectively states that A = A.

The primary philosophical rival of Aristotle, according to most accounts, was his teacher Plato. Plato used the ancient form of dialectics, meaning the ascertainment of truth by argument, most famously employed by the philosopher Socrates. The Socratic dialogues show his interrogation of the “sophists,” those who cynically manipulated the language to justify any position. Socrates, who was nicknamed the “gadfly” of Athens, was famously executed for his challenging of tradition and religion.

While Plato’s collectivist view of the ideal “Republic” prefigures communism, Plato’s view of attempting to ascertain truth by dialogue and questioning should not be seen as the antithesis of Aristotle’s method. The starkest contrast for both Aristotle and Plato are the sophists, who are emblematic of civilizational decline as manifested by their abuse of language.

One of the clearest illustrations of how the deterioration of language leads to stasis or revolution and chaos is Thucydides‘ The History of the Peloponnesian War. In this first “modern” history, Pericles is the demagogue who manipulates the Athenian mob into continuing the war against Sparta, despite the Athenians‘ decimation by plague. Later, in the ultimate sign of hubris, the Athenians are persuaded into launching a disastrous expedition to Sicily, where they are promptly routed by the Syracusans and the Spartans.

Such we can see in ancient history the theme of Aristotle as the elucidator of reason as a human faculty capable of knowing objective reality, Plato as the expositor of reason as discourse, and the sophists as the propagators of anti-reason. Logos in ancient Greek means not only reason, but language. By implication, the destruction of language is the destruction of reason.

The Romans borrowed heavily from the ancient Greeks and applied the Aristotelian view of reason to make great strides in law and engineering. After the Roman empire collapsed in the West, the Europeans fell into a period of superstition and obscurity, known popularly as the “Dark Ages.” While many challenge that there was such a period of civilizational stagnation in Europe, they are merely bridling at the implication that collectivism is a dysfunctional political and societal ordering principle. But the proof is in the pudding – the Roman achievements in engineering, law, and literature still stand, and post-Roman Europe, up to around the tenth century, is a rabble of disconnected artifacts.

The rediscovery of Aristotle by scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas paved the way for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Since that period, men began to systematically question and sweep away the dogmas of the day, the human mind again being seen as an instrument of observing and making sense of objective reality. The true leap forward in logic and empiricism ushered in astounding progress in the fields of astronomy, anatomy, chemistry, physics, and the natural sciences.

But in the spirit of skepticism inherent in the Enlightenment project of dismantling superstition and illogical beliefs lay a seed of anti-reason. In the newly found freedom of inquiry, intellectuals began to dismiss the logical and empirical foundations of scientific thinking and to attack reason and thinking itself.

The Romantic period can be seen as a transition in human thought from the Enlightenment conception of reason, rooted in an Aristotelian view of reality, to a new view of reason, one stressing reason as discourse and deliberation. Romanticism fed a desire by many to “escape from reason” and objective reality by retreating into sentimentalism, collectivism, mysticism, and tribalism. But it only presaged the eventual backlash and assault on reason that came with Frederic Nietzsche’snihilism and the dialectics of Hegel, and his pupil, Karl Marx.

While Nietzsche can be seen as someone who sincerely desired to liberate the mind from ancient superstitions, including in his view, religion, ultimately he urged the “will to power” by those whom he called “the supermen,” and the creation of mythos to turn men back from the brink of self-destruction.

While Nietzsche can be seen as the modern “gadfly” of our age (although he was no fan of Socrates), it took Hegel and Marx to codify a systematic philosophy of anti-reason, which was ushered in by the great leveler of reason, Immanuel Kant. Kant built on David Hume‘s dismissal of causality as happenstance to compose destructive critiques of reason.

Immanuel Kant was admired by Hegel, and Kantian thinking turns up in several of Hegel’s passages. But Hegel’s adaptation of his rival Fichte’s dialectical reasoning was the symphony of destruction needed to undo the gains of the Enlightenment, both intellectually and politically.

Hegelian dialectics is a self-contained, self-referential philosophical system that in its simplest popular form means that “thesis and antithesis results in synthesis.” It is a view of human history and reality that is the obliteration of the Aristotelian law of identity, A = A, which is the touchstone of the founding philosopher of objectivismAyn Rand.

It took Karl Marx to take the limitations of dialectics as a phenomenon of mind and instrumentalize it as a weapon to be put into practice by developing his key approach of “dialectical materialism.” Marx thus brought to fruit the teachings of the old master Hegel by “turning him right side up.” Hegel was a believer in the “unity of the particular and the universal” and a proponent of “freedom in the state.” In this way, he is a philosopher often credited with fathering the twentieth century left and right totalitarianisms of communism and fascism, respectively.

But Marx’s masterstroke, by reversing Hegel, was being able to make an argument that his dialectical materialism led to ultimate freedom from the state. Yet the application of Marxism, since it is a philosophy that is “free” from the objective reality of scarcity, leads itself to totalitarianism without any miraculous “redemption” at any unspecified point in the future. It is simply destruction: of reason, of economy, of society, all the way down.

In some ways, the structure of American government facilitated the traction of dialectical reason because the representative bodies were founded on deliberation and discourse. Freedom to debate truth in a marketplace of ideas led to the apprehension of the process of debating truth as reason itself. But reason is not about the process, it is about ascertaining truth as grounded in objective reality, with the assumption that there is such a thing as cause and effect.

A transitional thinker in the history of liberalism, and one who can be seen as a fulcrum in the shift from classical liberalism to modern liberalism is John Stuart Mill. Mill’s On Liberty, though a marvelous work in many regards, shows signs of the replacement of the Aristotelian view of reason with the view of reason as discourse and deliberation.

It is with the deep drive for liberty in the thinking of some Enlightenment philosophers that freedom begins to intellectually cannibalize itself through a focus more on language than on objective reality. “Freedom” becomes unhinged from the moorings of Aristotelian rationality and begins to embrace aspects of nihilism, leading to modern liberalism.

Within the modern liberal left developed left and right flanks, Marxism and progressivism, respectively, around the turn of the twentieth century. While Marxists were revolutionaries eager to destroy the “bourgeois” state and the prevailing capitalist economy, the progressives were incrementalists who sought to usher in the Hegelian triumph of the Idea.

The problem with Marxism is that though its program was perfectly destructive, its explanation of reality and history is simply wrong. It failed to predict spontaneous socialist revolutions in advanced capitalist states, and the cooperation of workers worldwide to break the horror of World War I. The “vulgar” sentiment of nationalism overwhelmed the workers and convinced the Marxists that their assessment of the power of socialism as an idea was mistaken.

This led to a resurgence of Hegel on the left, and an adoption of a program by leftists in the most advanced capitalist states to proceed with socialism, or more accurately, the destruction of capitalism, incrementally. This impetus gave birth to both Fabian socialists and neomarxists, the twin heads of the progressive program to transform capitalist societies; the economic and the ideal spheres of the New Left, respectively.

The New Left‘s program initially argued for a “Third Way” between radical Marxism and capitalism, which was only “reasonable” according to the synthetic logic employed by the left.

Since America, the land of the free, embraced the model of reason in government as deliberative discourse according to the “will of the people,” the creeping introduction of socialistic ideals led to a situation where capitalists, whose model of economy explicitly embraced an Aristotelian understanding of objective reality through scarcity, supply-and-demand, and the free operation of prices, were forced to “compromise” with the undoing of the system; that is, they had to introduce unreason and unreality into government and economy.

The earliest paragon of the “third way” between capitalism and socialism is best exemplified by Benito Mussolini. As Jonah Goldberg details in Liberal Fascism, Mussolini was a Marxist who opportunistically exploited rising Italian nationalism and the corporatism of Benedetto Croce to found a “mixed economy” where capitalism still existed, but property was owned and controlled by the state, while labor was directed by the state.

The Frankfurt School, led by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, drew on the work of Hegel to develop sophisticated forms of propaganda that would erode capitalist and Christian societies and usher in their demise. Gramsci urged communists to penetrate every sphere of culture and use it to urge members of “democracies” to capture the state. Lukacs essentially codified ways to pervert the youth to rebel against Christianity.

The chaos and discontent of the late 1960s led to radicals seeking to specifically undo any reason that might be drawn upon to make sense of their destructive program and to head it off before it was too late. Many entered academia and began the project of codifying unreason. This was not only done through the teaching of Marx, but by the adaptation of Alinsky’s principles to teaching, specifically, speaking to one’s audience in the language the people will understand.

During this turbulent period, Cloward and Piven harnessed Gramscian theory to persuade the less well-off to make incessant demands on the welfare state, as established by the pseudo-fascist FDR and continued by Lyndon Johnson. Alinsky was a field general in organizing communities to make increasing demands on the system, propelling it to collapse.

Jurgen Habermas is a modern philosopher whose “intercommunicative rationality” has persuaded elites that discourse is reason. Subjectivism, as encapsulated in postmodernism, has stymied the penetration of evidence into the minds of leftists to provide counterfactuals and to illustrate the destructive nature of their worldview. Thomas Kuhn transformed science from the Popperian philosophy of science as the falsification of theory to the Kuhnian one based on “paradigms” and “consensus.” Kuhnian science can be demonstrated most readily by the incessant refrain from elites that the “debate is over” regarding the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which has been falsified six ways from Sunday by satellite data and other empirical evidence.

In such a view of the world as the elites now propagate, evil is not evil, good is not good, there is only the gray area that is “reality.” In this worldview, private property is negotiable, individual rights are expendable, and the Constitution is subject to “interpretation.”

The destruction of reason as a means to ascertain truth using logic and evidence is the destruction of the free society, which only exists in objective reality, not in the utopian constructs of the systematically unhinged mind.

The universities have become institutions of systematized insanity, factories for the training of unreasonable foot-soldiers who only know the refrain, “we want,” “we demand,” and “we have a right.” Whether those “rights” infringe on the fundamental rights of others is beyond their comprehension; to reason as such would be a destruction of their “have their cake and eat it too,” “that’s a false choice” mentality.

As George Orwell noted, “Political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” And the language of the left is not only decayed, it is twisted, manipulative, and perverse to its very core.

The full import of the argument of this article is that there is no reasoning with the elites currently directing American society and economy to its necessary destruction.

The elites have no need for the average American’s “common sense,” the logic and fact-based reason of conservative spokesmen, or the demonstrable history of republics that descend into democratic chaos and ultimately, tyranny.

There is literally no traction for truth based in reality in the minds of elites, there is only their innate drive for power, influence, and the admiration of their elite peers. Their scorn of tea party activists is predictable, and their inability to see how the statist program they view as a “reasonable mix of capitalism mixed with socialism” (or “mixed economy”) undermines the freedom that is the foundation of their worldview is intellectually ingrained.

Those who see reason as “discourse,” those self-described moderates and independents, cannot be persuaded by moderation itself, but by a forceful articulation of the antithesis of the left’s ideas, not only on the basis of the substance of particular issues, but on that of the fundamental approach to government-individual relations as articulated by the Constitution as framed by a proper understanding of reason.

The Constitution is the best known political guideline for society not because it implies a philosophy that we desire to be true, but one that simply is true. The success of the United States, far from being the result of injustice, was due to the proper understanding of reason and reality by the founders as applied to the framing of the Constitution.

Only those who are strict adherents to the Constitution, therefore, must be elected. Whether or not we can save ourselves from the element of “reason as discourse,” which is eroding the fundamental individual rights of life, liberty, and private property, is very much in doubt.

Increasing numbers of moderates, however, are slowly being persuaded through living evidence of the error of the “third way” of economics; though the Marxists, who are intent on destruction as they carry out their demented plan of “liberation,” will only push harder.

Armed with the truth and the proper understanding of reason and reality, we can bring to bear the best possible defense of our republic. Only by showing and displaying to the moderates and independents the light of reason can we possibly hope to realign the aims of on an increasingly tyrannical government with the constraints of objective reality; this would do much to lighten the burden on those who bear the costs of ignorance.

In the dream I was on a train. An old fashioned passenger car, something like the old steamer engines pulled. Inside the car were many other passengers of higher station than me, Diplomats, Advisors, and Politicians.

Along both the sides of the car were couches and private curtained areas. Down the middle were picnic bench-like seats separated at lengths with enough space for people to walk through to either side as they wished. I was sitting at the end of one such section crammed against two aristocratic looking men. The tables were all full and seats were rare.

“I don’t know what the Democrats could be planning with the Middle East,” one said to the other.

“What could you mean? They do not have a plan. The region is tearing itself apart on its own. No one plans such things,” the other answered.

“Israel cannot stand alone there. Without her the party will lose support back home. Someone needs to step in and take control of the situation,” the first man spoke.

Sounding more like two men thinking out loud than in a conversation with each other.

Both men were dressed in the style of the 1910’s. Heavy woolen clothes marked with medals and sashes. The man closest to me was bald with a head spotted by brown freckles. The other man had slicked back brown hair and a well trimmed proud mustache.

They went on in their detached conversation and I had no other choice but to listen until finally I rose up from my seat and looked down at the bald man and said, “I could tell you what the hell is going on but I am just a lay-person what the hell can I have to say that matters at all to you people, right.”

The two men looked at each other and the bald one spoke to me, to my back anyway. In my passion of anger I had turned away from them once I had spoken my peace. So sure that such elite men would have no time for a regular person such as me, dressed in a plain cotton shirt, cheap ill-fitted pants held up with suspenders.

“Come sit down. Tell us what you think,” the bald man said to me. He even stood up and put a hand on my shoulder to encourage my turning back and sitting. His voice was calm. His slick haired acquaintance looked both amused and disgusted at the thought of having me speak and him listening.

I did sit down and reluctance to bother. Elitists did not listen to the people below them. No in the elite minds of the world they were the only ones to speak, the rest of us were to listen and obey.

“You want to know what the plan is,” I asked the bald man looking him in the eyes then giving his friend a glance that looked away as if bored already, “the plan is to let Israel die and the Middle East catch on fire for no other reason than pursuit of power.”

Already some people who had heard my first words people were moving away. Baldy was still looking back at me unwavering and seeming earnest in wanting to hear what I had to say.

“What better way to bring about the ruin of a great nation than to wear down its people until they welcome any change,” I asked but did not wait for an answer, “Why would it be in the world’s interest to tear down Egypt? To bring down Mubarak and remove an ally?”

“He had to go because he was a dictator,” the bald man interrupted.

“He was a moderate and an ally. Our militaries trained together and the country was stable. I have been there, have you? Then Libya. What was Libya doing that needed to have revolution backed by the Oval Office? Kaddafi was not doing anything, again the country was stable and after 9/11 Kaddafi swore off his nuclear program. What was the threat from him, another dictator he was, but at least a calm one.

“Meanwhile the student protests in Iran go ignored. In Syria the streets are running with the blood of her citizens at the hands of a hard-line dictator. Not a peep is made to stop the killing from the White House. The Party wants murderous dictators to rule that region. How else to enact revolutionary uprisings and all out warfare? Keep the hatreds of the area smoldering until reaching a flash-point.”

As I spoke more seats become available at the bench I was at. Curtains closed around couches here and there. For many, the ideas I was speaking are to be ignored. Yet my new found bald friend still seems to be listening.

“You said Israel cannot be left to stand alone,” nodding to the slick haired guy, “Sure, the Party can let that little country can be left to stand alone to be overrun by ‘Allah Akbar’ screaming enraged Muslims who have been taught from birth to exterminate the Jews for the love of Allah. That all the world’s problems are because of the Jews and that once they are all dead everything will be perfect. We have a similar version of that storyline between two demographics in the United States,” more curtains closed at those words, “The Democrat Party has no fear in Israel being wiped away from the world as American Jewish are so entrenched in the Party they would never vote any other way than for Democrats. Hell, many segments of those following the Party would celebrate the genocide of the Jewish people of Israel as they too believe Jews to be evil and to blame. Afterwards, if it should ever happen, both Jews and their jubilant in the destruction of Israeli counterparts will stand side-by-side at a polling station and vote for the Party”

By then the train car could have been empty. About half of the other passengers had hidden themselves away. Those people not concealed where either pretending not to be hearing or were looking in silence at me.

A woman came in with two children, boys about nine and ten years old. While the kids made their way about the car laughing and talking their mother came and sat next to the bald man, giving him a kiss. The slick haired friend had left his seat at some point in my speech without my even noticing so intent I was in having my say since finally having been asked.

“My wife,” he said in introductions between us. She was a gorgeous woman with short cropped black hair and olive skin. She wore some gold around her neck that draped in contrast to a well fitted black conservative yet casual dress that went past her knees. She gave off an impression of being happy and content while making herself at home at the bench, as if she had lived there all her life. She smiled at me and I went on.

“But you want to know what the plan is,” I asked resetting the conversation, “the plan has been going on for a long time. To destroy America’s religions through open and active hostilities as well as infiltrate the message of God in the churches to fit the narrative of the government. Uproot the traditions of the family, make government the mother and father. Remove fathers all together and hand out rewards for doing so. Absolve citizens of personal responsibility over their lives. Every bad-deed committed by a person can be traced back to some manufactured slight against them in the past. Destroy the private sector middle class and replace it with a contrived government one. Take over education not to teach but to indoctrinate students, even to the point of turning them against their parents. ”

I paused to look around. Those people who were left out in the open were staring right at me. Some faces had a non to happy look on them. No sense in stopping then, I was on a roll. As I got my breath and was about to start again the two boys that had come in with the Cleopatra-like beauty began going to the front of the train car. I stopped and watched the boys while everyone paid attention to me.

The oldest boy reached for the door set into the trains’ front and pulled the doors lever set in its middle. The door didn’t open, it was no longer there. There was no other train car in front of ours or an engine to be seen. There was nothing to see. A blank white standing rectangle was all to be seen. No light existed or shown. It was simply. Nothing.

Stepped off into the nothing the boys went without a peep either from them of anyone in the car. Not even their parents. Their mother looked at her husband and told him to go get the boys, a request he ignored so both sat in their seats. Looking back at me they expected me to go on so I did.

“Once the country is under attack from within it will be necessary to begin turning the people against each other. No matter how light the grievance it must be exploded and amplified. Tear down all unity and patriotism. Have everyone looking out for themselves and screw everyone else,” I looked over the people looking back at me. Certain that with them being the elite they would understand that point completely, “next the Party has but one institution to destroy, the Military.

“Through political correct principles service members will be taught that it is better for them to die than to kill their enemy. An enemy who is embraced by the Commander in Chief in front of the soldiers sent to fight. Words of encouragement from the Commander in the Oval Office are reserved for the militants and followers of death and martyrdom. Unity will be destroyed within the branches by forcing political ideals into military doctrine. Instead of serving the Constitution the military will be forced to serve the Party. Soldiers who have pride, patriotism, love of country and service will be forced to leave military service and others will be discouraged from joining.

“How does the Party keep good men and women from serving in the last bastion of American pride,” I asked looking around. Turning in my seat I faced the people behind me who had been breathing down my neck, “you deploy those soldiers over and over until they don’t re-enlist. You give them more wars that have no definition of goals and when defending themselves soldiers are slandered and punished by both their leaders who sent them and the Party’s media lap dogs. Cut benefits and retirement pay. Make it easier to collect government welfare than to apply for aid from Veterans Affairs for wounds both physical and mental incurred during combat operations,” making my right hand into a fist I pushed it hard, twisting back and forth into the palm of my left, “you grind and grind away at the military until no one wants to join. And when very few do with the right traditional values of the once proud organization the Party fills the ranks with who it wants to have armed to the teeth with state of the art killing equipment.”

By that point even the bald man had left for some other place to sit. His wife however had stayed and was staring at me hard with bright eyes and a predator’s visage. She moved toward me. I had to lean back in against the bench top at her advancement. Partially straddling me she looked down into my eyes. Her black hair hung toward my face but it was those eyes I wondered about as well as those longer and sharper canines grinning down at me.

“Tell your story, it doesn’t matter even the slightest,” she began saying as she, like a creature of great agility slid back to her place on the bench seat, “We have been at work for a much longer time than you will ever know and as you can see by looking around; no one is paying you any attention other than me,” of which she spoke true. Not another person was listening or caring and had gone from hiding away from my speech to going on about whatever distraction they pursued.

“After all that what is to happen next,” she asked taunting me.

“When everything has been put into place, the pillars of American society pulled down. The bonds that bind America together have been cut and neighbor has been set against neighbor,” looking around the car away from her bright eyes that seemed hold unspeakable evil lit behind them no one was watching the engagement between her and me, “then the jackboots of the Party come marching in to crush the throat of freedom. Everything else, even if it means creating World War Three coming across the globe spread from the Middle East, every event will be but a means to an end. Freedoms end. Global Dictatorship ruling human beings beginning.”

With those final words of mine from behind I was grabbed at the shoulders and pushed to the floor. A black leather boot that ran tight against the woman’s calf was pushed down over my neck while strong arms held me from getting up. My blood and air were cut off and my vision was shrinking as if I was falling down a well. Before I woke up from that dream the last words from the woman in black were, “you’re too late and of no importance.”

Then I woke up.

####

Tom is an erratic contributor to CDN. Former U.S. Army Signal Corps soldier, outspoken future Re-Education Camp intern #7-2521, world traveler, combat veteran and Author of the new books Lone Wolf, Sucker Punched, dystopian near future America novels, and One Tough Truck (a War Story) available at Amazon.com.

“A creative mind does nothing to another mind — except offer it material to digest, which the other mind may digest or not, as it pleases.” –Ayn Rand